Suicide Rates Globally

Introduction

Our project will be investigating suicide rates globally in comparison to the mental health facilities offered in each country, and the GDP per Capita of each country. All data is taken for the most recent years that the country had data for the category. Suicide has become more widely talked about in social media in recent years, however it seems that the awareness of mental health has been an emerging topic in developed countries but is not as emphasized in undeveloped countries. Suicide has resulted in the loss of many amazing people. As such, we want to investigate possible correlations between these different indicators, hopefully determining a reason or a trend for higher suicide rates in particular countries over others.

We will be using combined data from both Suicide Rates Overview 1985 to 2016 and Mental health service availability to create data visualizations that may aid us in finding these trends.

Our combined dataset has 69 countries and columns: country, suicides_number, gpd_per_capita, suicides_100kpop, total_avalibility. The average suicide rate (per 100k population) was 130.8307246, with the largest suicide rate of 389.14. The average GDP per capita for this dataset is 2.3730957^{4} and the average number of mental health facilities offered (per 100k population) was 5.4224638.

Summary Table

This table is sorted by suicide rates and contains all countries we are assessing as well as their corresponding average GDPs per capita, number of mental health facilities, and the total number of suicides.

country Gpd per capita Number of suicides (per 100k population) Mental Health Facility Avaliable(per 100k population)
Barbados 17395 0.00 5.982
Grenada 10838 0.00 12.169
Bahrain 27503 6.52 2.260
South Africa 6403 13.00 0.298
Bahamas 30455 13.91 1.294
Antigua and Barbuda 14853 15.62 1.001
Qatar 62484 16.43 0.611
Turkey 11961 28.47 0.830
Armenia 3788 40.56 1.474
Guatemala 4472 44.85 1.452
Panama 15158 44.90 3.023
Cyprus 25098 47.15 1.636
Greece 18927 56.06 9.200
Israel 39793 65.91 1.934
Mexico 10228 66.57 0.252
Nicaragua 2303 69.87 0.756
Colombia 6552 70.40 2.502
Costa Rica 11485 70.85 1.957
Paraguay 5254 72.15 1.581
Thailand 6713 77.32 1.488
Brazil 9431 77.45 1.942
Italy 31537 78.45 8.675
Seychelles 16005 81.25 5.335
Georgia 4046 84.68 1.088
Uzbekistan 2309 85.12 0.230
Saint Lucia 9372 91.56 20.315
Spain 27108 97.38 3.256
Ecuador 6832 97.39 3.450
Kyrgyzstan 1285 98.37 1.431
Mauritius 10570 99.30 1.587
El Salvador 3965 101.84 1.014
Singapore 81766 109.29 0.524
Bosnia and Herzegovina 5079 109.50 2.064
Argentina 14981 112.13 3.880
Romania 10020 116.33 1.751
Ireland 59634 119.68 9.617
Netherlands 48108 127.39 0.201
Canada 55310 133.09 0.788
Luxembourg 107456 134.40 5.646
Belize 5561 135.46 4.731
Norway 79187 136.43 3.251
Iceland 64708 138.07 7.873
Bulgaria 8241 139.77 8.499
New Zealand 46198 144.55 0.607
Chile 14729 147.68 2.523
Germany 43201 150.34 2.473
Portugal 23091 153.89 1.805
Australia 60656 154.18 2.529
Finland 44862 161.19 11.329
Switzerland 86068 164.66 3.329
Poland 13228 166.99 4.309
Austria 46976 183.23 10.878
Mongolia 4145 184.39 0.571
Cuba 8044 194.31 4.904
Belgium 42830 196.66 2.162
Estonia 18149 205.38 36.328
Serbia 5492 205.97 1.063
Japan 36510 206.04 20.112
Croatia 12905 213.56 4.580
Russian Federation 9987 236.92 2.664
Hungary 13448 241.34 11.222
Ukraine 2256 244.72 1.816
Latvia 14382 251.47 77.685
Belarus 8849 252.91 0.664
Slovenia 22036 264.81 11.760
Uruguay 16696 270.02 1.632
Guyana 4372 356.38 0.520
Lithuania 15742 361.72 4.740
Republic of Korea 28410 389.14 3.097

This summary of our data is arranged in ascending order of suicides. As such, we can observe that the Republic of Korea has the highest number of suicides(with 389.14 suicides per 100k population), followed by Lithuania(361.72 suicides per 100k population) and Guyana(356.38 per 100k population).

Mental Health Facilities Available

This map displays the ratio of mental health facilities available globally to suicide rates, showing in a color scale the countries in our data that offers global health facilities.

The darker the color, the more ineffective the mental health facility as the ratio of suicides to facilities available is higher than the lighter colored regions. The darkest area is located in a country in South America. There doesn’t appear to be a trend in particular regions, but the darkest region is significantly smaller than many of the other lighter regions. Perhaps land size might be affecting the ratio as more mental facilities might be built due to there being more land.

Gender and Age

This bar chart displays trends in suicide rates between the different age groups of each gender (Male or Female). As each age group has 2 discrete categories within them (the genders), we felt that a bar chart is more appropriate to display the trends.

From this chart, we can observe that suicide rates increase across both genders from individuals 5-14 years old, to individuals 35-54 years old. The number of suicides peak for individuals of both genders between 35-54 years old with 34532 suicides per 100k population for females and … suicides per 100k population for males. The suicide rates for both genders decrease from individuals 55-74 years old to 75+ years old. The lowest number of suicides observed was for the age group 5-14 years old. As such, we observe a bell curve in the number of suicides across both genders, centering around individuals between 35-54 years old. There were lower suicide rates for females than for males across every age group.

GDP per Capita

We created a scatterplot to display the GDP per capita of each country against their respective suicide rates for the years 2014 to 2016. We were investigating potential connections between suicide rates and a country’s socioeconomic status.

However, as we can observe from this scatterplot, there does not appear to be a correlation between the GDP per capita of a country and the suicide rate of the country across all 3 years. However, there are groupings of data plots that display particular characteristics. The countries with the highest suicide rates(300-400 per 100k population) were within 0-0.5 million GDP per Capita while countries with GDP per capita between 1 million and 1.5 million had suicide rates under 200(per 100k population).

Conclusion

The country with the highest suicide rate to mental health facility ratio is located in a country in South America. There doesn’t appear to be a trend affecting ratios in particular regions of the world, but the region with the highest ratio is significantly smaller than many of the other lower ratio regions.

The data visualization for suicide rates, age and gender displays a bell-shaped trend between the number of suicides and age across both males and females. The suicide rate is highest for both genders between 35-54 years old. The suicide rates for males was consistently lower than females throughout the age groups.

There does not seem to be a correlation between GDP per capita and suicide rates. However, the outlying data plots are grouped into particular categories. The countries with the highest suicide rates(300-400 per 100k population) were within 0-0.5 million GDP per Capita while countries with GDP per capita between 1 million and 1.5 million had suicide rates under 200(per 100k population).